Wordle Hard Mode: Rules and Tips

Wordle’s hard mode adds one rule: any letter you have revealed must be used in every later guess. Green letters must stay in place, and yellow letters must appear somewhere in the word. It sounds like a small change, but it removes one of the most useful strategies in the game.

What hard mode takes away

In normal mode, a good second guess often uses five completely new letters to gather information. In hard mode you cannot do that once you have any green or yellow tiles. Every guess must be a possible answer, so you can get stuck guessing one letter at a time.

The classic trap

Suppose you know the answer is _ATCH. It could be BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH, WATCH and more. In normal mode, you could play a word with B, C, H, L and M to test five options at once. In hard mode, every guess must end in ATCH, so you may need several guesses to find the right first letter.

Tips for hard mode

• Make your first guess count. Use an opener with five common letters, such as AROSE, ALERT and ATONE, so you learn as much as possible before the rule kicks in.
• Prefer grey results early. A first guess that returns mostly grey is not a disaster in hard mode: you are free to test new letters on guess two.
• Count the candidates. Before each guess, enter your clues in our Wordle solver and look at how many words are left. If there are many similar options, choose the one whose other letters are most common.
• Think about positions. With a yellow letter, choose a guess that puts it in its most likely new position.
• Accept the occasional loss. Word families like _IGHT or _ATCH will sometimes beat you. That is part of hard mode.

Does the solver work in hard mode?

Yes. Every word our solver shows already uses all your green and yellow letters, so every suggestion is a legal hard-mode guess.